Space Budgets: A Tote-All Lifestyle Revolution

Growing up, our basement was filled to the brim with bins, boxes, furniture, and just piles of useless items that we don’t use nor want anymore. The problem was, we had the space to put it still, so we kept it. Even with an annual purge for the garage sale, we still had more items than we would ever need for a family of four.

So, when I moved to the city for college, I vowed that I would never fill a basement with items the way my parents did. If it didn’t fit into the main house, it wasn’t needed. The problem was, after only a year or so, I had accumulated so much stuff that I found myself making that trek down to the basement.

Then, I read an article by Joshua Becker–and as many of his have before–and it changed my entire perspective.

The article was Space Budgets: A Simple Tool for Minimalist Living and within it he talked about setting a boundary for yourself about how much of one thing you allow yourself to own. Once you assign that specific place, when it fills you have to get rid of something already there in order to add something new.

My mind was blown. It’s such a simple concept, and it would have everyone’s house be purged of overflowing cabinets, shoved-to-the-brim drawers, and basements full of crap.

So, in the effort to start adopting more minimalistic practices for my own life, I decided to set up a space budget for certain things that were overflowing already, and I knew would only get worse with each year.

How did I do this? I created physical space budgets that could not be overstuffed. I did this by dedicating one tote bin to each area of overflow. They stack nicely, they’re durable, they’re fairly inexpensive for the lifetime purchase, and best of all, they cannot close if there’s too much stuff in them.

The first mess to condense into a tote was Christmas decorations. In my parent’s house, we had an entire wall filled three-totes-high with just Christmas decorations. Most years, we didn’t even put half of that out because it was just too much of a hassle. So I told myself that as long as I was living in an apartment, I would have to be limited to one tote bin of holiday decor.

Once I took down all of it and placed it in the bin, I still had about a quarter of a tote left empty, and that was ok. I knew that next season I wouldn’t be able to resist buying some super cute decorations from Target or Marshalls, but that wouldn’t be a problem because I still had a space budgeted for those items. If in a couple years that bin can’t shut, maybe I’ll get rid of some of the dozens of holiday-themed mugs I’m sure I’ll have.

I was lucky, because everything fit in the first bin I tried, so it gave me the confidence boost I needed to start doing this in every area of my home. Summer clothes were then assigned a tote, but they didn’t all fit, so I went through each individual item and kept only what was necessary for that season. The rest got sold or went to Goodwill for someone else to use. Tissue paper and other gift wrapping materials also got a tote bin. This would keep me from buying a rainbow assortment of bows when my pack of neutral ones would work just fine. My next task is making sure that my entire closet full of clothes can fit into one tote, even though they won’t stay folded in there.

The tote bins don’t need to be used to actually store everything, but they can be great cookie cutters for your excess things. Get rid of those scraps and turn them into another cookie; or in this case, donate the overflow and to make your room seem more spacious. You’ll still have a lot of nice things, you just won’t be drowning in things you don’t use anymore.

Find my favorite tote storage bins here and here